Msnbc News Time Again: Jfk Assassination

Like a lot of Americans, I remember November 22, 1963, but not November 21. If, as I was, you were very young—I was two months shy of my sixth altogether—in that location'due south very trivial of your life before that engagement that you lot tin can retrieve. Of John F. Kennedy, I knew only two things when our kindergarten teacher told the states, on the playground of Theodore Roosevelt Elementary School in New Rochelle, New York, that he'd been killed. He was the president, and his job was to ship John Glenn into outer space. Now he wouldn't.

If y'all were older, it'southward notwithstanding doubtful that whatever occupied you on the day before, or the solar day before that, was anywhere near and so memorable equally Nov. 22. And virtually people live today take no memory of the run-upward to Kennedy's assassination in Dallas, for an even simpler reason: they had not yet been born.

What was America like in 1963, before Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby-red became household names?

• The price of a stamp, at five cents, was lower, after aggrandizement, than information technology is today; the minimum wage, at $1.25 an hour, was college.

•  Median family income was well-nigh $6,200, merely for "nonwhite" (mainly black) families, it was $3,465. The blackness-white income gap is narrower today, but simply by about half-dozen percentage points.

• Martin Luther Male monarch had given his "I Accept A Dream" speech communication three months before; all the major civil rights laws had yet to be enacted.

• New York Metropolis still had vi daily newspapers. A seventh, the Hearst-endemic Daily Mirror, had died the month before, the victim of a lengthy paper strike whose aftereffects would, over the next 4 years, kill off three more than.

• Diane Sawyer, historic period 17, was America'south reigning Junior Miss--a competition since renamed "Distinguished Young Women," probably in deference to the social motion that Betty Friedan helped create that same twelvemonth by publishing "The Feminine Mystique."

• Ronald Reagan--having recently concluded an eight-year stint with General Electric, for whom he'd been a Telly host and speechmaker—accepted his final film role, that of mob boss Jack Browning in "The Killers." It would be the only movie Reagan made after switching his registration from Democrat to Republican, and (coincidentally) the only one in which he played the bad guy.

• The U.S. media was starting to take note of the Beatles phenomenon in Britain, though mainly to sneer. "The London Times has carried the sobering written report that the Beatles may bring their Mersey audio to the United States," Edwin Newman reported November 18 on NBC'due south Huntley-Brinkley Written report, "to which it may be rejoined, 'Show us no Mersey.'"

• Also on November. eighteen, AT&T introduced the affect-tone phone. ZIP ("Zone Improvement Plan") codes were introduced the previous summer. Other products introduced that year included Kodak'due south Instamatic camera and Hasbro'south Easy Broil Oven. The dance craze of the moment was the Monkey ("Lam di lam di la").

Chronologically, 1963 marked a rough midpoint between the death of the last surviving veteran of the Civil War (1956) and the commencement moon landing (1969); betwixt Hitler's defeat (1945) and the first clinical recognition of the AIDS epidemic (1981); and betwixt the Paris premiere of Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" (1913) and the terminal episode of "Breaking Bad" (2013).

On Nov 21, 1963, Robert Stroud, the "Birdman of Alcatraz" whose life was romanticized in a 1962 motion picture starring Burt Lancaster—Stroud's ornithological enthusiasms did not, in fact, gentle his tearing impulses—died at 73. (Stroud was never permitted to see the film.) That same day saw the births of the actress Nicollette Sheridan ("The Sure Thing," "Desperate Housewives"), the playwright-director Moises Kaufman ("The Laramie Project"), and Tony McConkey, a bourgeois Republican member of Maryland's House of Delegates.

It's November 21, and you desire to go to the movies. What'south playing? "Under The Yum Yum Tree," "The Incredible Journeying," "Information technology's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World," John Wayne in "McClintock!," Vincent Toll in "Twice-Told Tales," and James Stewart and Sandra Dee in "Have Her, She's Mine" (remembered today solely considering the Dee character was loosely based on the teenage Nora Ephron; her parents wrote it).

Hmm. Mayhap you'll stay in.

It'southward Thursday, right? ABC'south got "Donna Reed" and "My Iii Sons," CBS has "Rawhide," and NBC has something chosen "Temple Houston" (Perry Stonemason-goes-west drama starring Jeffrey Hunter; lasted only one season).

Or maybe you'll just take hold of upwardly on your reading. Mary McCarthy'southward racy "The Group" tops The New York Times best-seller list for fiction. The non-fiction list is headed by "JFK: The Man and the Myth," a hatchet task by Victor Lasky, followed (somewhat ominously) by "The American Way of Death," Jessica Mitford'due south betrayal of the funeral manufacture, at number two.

Kennedy was on his way to Dallas, but on November 21 Richard Nixon was already there, to nourish a meeting of the American Bottlers of Carbonated Beverages. After losing the 1960 presidential race to Kennedy, Nixon had lost the 1962 California gubernatorial race to Pat Brown. Now he was a partner in the New York law house of Nixon, Mudge, Rose, Guthrie, Alexander, & Mitchell, where Nixon'south friend Donald Kendall, president of Pepsi, was a customer. As well in attendance at the bottlers meeting was the actress Joan Crawford, widow of Pepsi's former chairman.

On the morn of Nov 21, Nixon met with reporters at the Baker Hotel in downtown Dallas. He noted that Kennedy had lost back up in Texas, which was true; indeed, that was Kennedy'southward main reason for visiting the country with his Texan vice-president, Lyndon Johnson.

"Nosotros were going to do something virtually Castro in Cuba," Nixon told the reporters. "Nosotros were going to exercise something about American prestige away, and also about sort-of-permanent unemployment" (then v.7%). "Nosotros detect that on all of these issues there's been no action." Nixon added that Johnson's "stock is not as loftier in Texas, at least from what I've seen, as it was. In 1960, Lyndon was a assist. In 1964 he might not be." A Dallas News headline the side by side mean solar day blared, "Nixon Predicts JFK May Drop Johnson."

In that location was, in fact, much gossip about whether Kennedy might dump Johnson from the 1964 ticket, and Kennedy'southward secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, afterward recalled that earlier he left for Dallas Kennedy told her he might replace Johnson with North Carolina Governor Terry Sanford. Of detail business was the ethics investigation of Bobby Bakery, Secretary of the Senate and a Johnson protégé when Johnson was Senate majority leader. Outrageous stories alleging that Baker paid bribes and hosted debauched parties in which naked young prostitutes poured champagne over each other were embarrassing the Kennedy assistants, and the investigation was starting to suggest Johnson knew virtually them.

An article published in Life magazine on Nov. 18 quoted one anonymous source calling Baker (who eventually did jail fourth dimension for larceny, fraud and revenue enhancement evasion) "Lyndon's bluntest instrument in running the show." Two former Life magazine editors subsequently told Johnson biographer Robert Caro that the magazine was preparing a more than ambitious investigation into Johnson's own extensive history of ethically questionable fiscal dealings. Life would scrub the project after November 22, first considering the assassination was the only story, and afterward because it wanted to give the new president a chance to succeed.

Another journalistic casualty of the bump-off was a special CIA issue of the short-lived satirical mag Monocle, edited past Victor Navasky and dated November 19, 1963. Considering of the assassination, Navasky would recall in his 2005 memoir, "A Matter of Opinion," "almost of the 75,000 copies never left the warehouse." The decision non to distribute was a costly one, and inside a couple of years Monocle was no more than.

During a Nov. 21 stopover with Kennedy in San Antonio, Johnson suffered another setback. Texas Senator Ralph Yarborough, a Democrat, was feuding with Texas Governor (and fellow Democrat) John Connally. Kennedy wanted Johnson to put an end to it; winning Texas in 1964 would be difficult plenty without a Democratic party riven by conflict. To resolve the matter, Johnson had to talk to Yarborough. But Yarborough refused--in full view of reporters--to ride in a motorcade with Johnson. A headline in the next morning's Dallas News would read, "Yarborough Snubs LBJ." Connally, Johnson felt, was likewise treating him disrespectfully, and after, in a Houston hotel room, Caro writes in "The Passage of Power," "there were, perhaps for the offset fourth dimension since Kennedy had been elected, loud, aroused words directly between the president and the vice president."

All of this—the investigations, the slights, Johnson's fears near his political future—would evaporate on Nov. 22.

In San Antonio, Air Force One landed in Lackland Air Strength Base, where the hereafter playwright John Guare ("Six Degrees of Separation") had reported the previous month for basic training. November 21 marked the first pause Guare recalls from "the countless calisthenics, bumming marching, learning to fire a burglarize, kitchen duty, learning to accept orders." Guare's platoon stood at attention and saluted the president, vice president, and their wives on a distant landing strip. Then it was fourth dimension for a smoke. According to Guare (whose monologue near that solar day was included in a contempo multimedia effect at New York's Symphony Space and reprinted in the Huffington Post) his "fellow airmen nuts" used this precious free fourth dimension to mutter one hateful thing after another nearly the visiting political party: "Nosotros got to stand in this hot dominicus for a north----- lover?" "He don't vest in Texas." "He ain't my president." "I'd like to prove that wife of his what a man is." And then on. When word came the next day that Kennedy was dead, Guare writes, "a cheer went up…. I have never felt so isolated in my life as I did that mean solar day."

Kennedy's ain feel of November 21 is, similar Kennedy himself, a bit of a cipher. His aide Kenny O'Donnell recalled him saying that morning, in the White Business firm, "I feel great. My dorsum feels meliorate than it's felt in years." The historian William Manchester reported in his book "Expiry of A President" that Kennedy told Jackie he looked frontwards to riding that weekend at the Johnson ranch. But he was wearing a back brace, and at a speech communication later that solar day in Houston, Johnson aide Jack Valenti told Manchester, he observed Kennedy's hands "vibrating so violently at times that they seemed palsied," a symptom of Kennedy's Addison's disease.

A helicopter flew the Kennedys to Andrew Air Force Base of operations at 10:45 a.one thousand.; on the flying to San Antonio, the president asked aides about his blood brother Bobby's 38th birthday political party the nighttime before, which he hadn't attended. (Bobby himself spent most of Nov. 21st in a Justice department coming together nigh targeting organized crime.) None of Kennedy's public comments that twenty-four hours is particularly memorable. Kennedy spent much of the twenty-four hours trying to become aides to twist Yarborough'southward arm into talking to Johnson. He and Jackie spent the night at Fort Worth's Texas Hotel, in a suite decorated with paintings by Monet, Van Gogh, Picasso, and others, lent by local collectors. The splendor was lost on them, because they didn't make it at their hotel until afterwards midnight and went directly to bed.

Non quite one month earlier, on Oct 24, United Nations Administrator Adlai Stevenson had given a oral communication in Dallas and been jeered past an aroused correct wing oversupply shouting "Communist!" and "Traitor!" and "Kennedy will become his reward in hell." Stevenson said to one heckler: "Surely, my love friend, I don't have to come here from Illinois to teach Texas manners, do I?" The protesters, egged on by a rally staged the dark before by retired Ground forces Major Full general Edwin Walker, a prominent, mentally unstable, and ultraconservative Dallas activist, had spat upon Stevenson and whacked him in the head with a placard that said "If You Seek Peace, Ask Jesus." The bearer was Cora Lacey Frederickson, wife of a Dallas insurance executive; Dallas' haters were drawn non from society's fringes just from its pathologically angry haute bourgeoisie.

This was well known to the rest of the country. James McAuley argued in a recent New York Times essay on Dallas earlier the assassination that it was parodied by Carol Burnett and Julie Andrews in a (retrospectively creepy) TV production number of the song "Big D" that ended with Burnett pulling a gun on Andrews and saying, "What are ya, some kinda nut?"

The Stevenson incident left Dallas'due south difficult right feeling more aggrieved than ashamed. On the morning of November 22, an advertisement in the Dallas News read: "Welcome Mr. Kennedy to Dallas. A metropolis so disgraced past a contempo Liberal smear effort that its citizens have just elected two more Conservative Americans to public part." The ad, taken out by a group that called itself The American Fact-Finding Committee, continued: "A city that volition go on to abound and prosper despite efforts by you and your administration to penalize it for its nonconformity to 'New Frontierism.'"

Kennedy laughed it off, but the hatred in Dallas was real. A "Wanted For Treason" leaflet distributed in Dallas in the days before Kennedy's visit defendant Kennedy of (among other crimes) giving "back up and encouragement to the Communist inspired racial riots" and appointing "anti-Christians to Federal office."

Shortly after the Stevenson incident, a woman named Nelle Doyle had written White Firm Press Secretary Pierre Salinger to urge him not to send the president in that location because of "this 'hoodlum mob' hither in Dallas… it is a dreadful idea, but all remember the fate of President McKinley."

Strangely, though, it wasn't a right-wing extremist who would end Kennedy'south life, but a confused and angry Marxist—1 who, seven months earlier, fired a shot not at Kennedy, nor Connolly, nor Johnson, nor Yarborough, but at Walker, whom he considered a fascist.

That time, Oswald missed.

phillipsshisho.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/america-the-day-msna216146

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